About the Artist
Cathy Weber

Cathy Weber grew up in the Midwestern U.S., studied at the Herron School of Art  and Indiana University, and completed a formal painting apprenticeship in Mexico City. In 1981 she moved to Dillon, Montana, where she maintains a studio in the historic downtown. Though Weber executes the bulk of her work in watercolor, she is skilled at working in a variety of media. Following the death of her partner and father of her child, she began the Grief Series, a group of paintings on skin and parchment inspired by 15th century European illuminated manuscripts. Weber has incorporated the poetry of Gertrude Stein to help express the process of grieving.

I am a visual artist living and working in Dillon, Montana. Although I have made prints, pots, oil painting, polychromed relief pieces, artist’s books and drawings, the bulk of my work is watercolor.

In the early 90’s I began making a series of paintings, on skin parchment, along the lines of 15^th century European illuminated manuscripts. I have been using the poetry of Gertrude Stein in the text blocks of many of the illuminations. Since one of Stein’s principle notions as a cubist poet was to have words function as objects in the context of her work, I thought her poems would be ideal for the blocks of texts that I hoped would function as objects within my pictures. I was also delighted that the work of a modern, American, lesbian writer was so well suited to what I had in mind.

In the fall of 1994, when I was 3 months pregnant (having had several earlier miscarriages), my partner of 12 years, Jack, was diagnosed with a soft tissue sarcoma of which he died nearly 2 years later in August of 1996. In the interim we endured the horrors of multiple surgeries and chemotherapeutic assaults and our son, Rio, was born.

I am of the opinion that the details of an artist’s personal life and experience are relevant only in so far as they are clearly communicated through her work. Even then, that communication is most powerful when the artist’s expression speaks to the human condition of the viewer in a way that elicits a personal emotional response within that viewer. In my own experience of paralyzing grief, it has occurred to me that humans love, die and experience profound heartache as a common element of our lives. Although the painful suffering of grief is a very personal and often private process few of us manage to escape it. With the pictures I am making now, I hope to translate my own grieving process into a series of images in which the viewers can recognize and honor themselves.

Upon Jack’s death, I began to make notations and sketches for a series of pictures based on my feelings and emotional experiences. For the first 18 months I was unable to face them in my studio but notions continued to present themselves and I continued to take notes. The finished body of work is made up of 20 pieces. Three contain stitched images that I made during endless hours at hospital bedsides. The others are paintings on skin. Some include text.

Because the structure of the work hails back to the tradition of the illuminated book and also contains visual elements of Mexican "retablo" paintings,  exhibition of these pictures calls for an intimate, chapel-like environment. At the Art Museum of  Missoula, the gallery was shrouded in black, providing a setting for viewers to express emotional responses elicited by the pictures.  View of the Installation.